One Week Down

So that's the first week of Copious Free Time out of the
way. Did I achieve anything? Nope.

I started on the nms article. Tinkered with some updates
to Array::Compare.
Read a lot of newsgroups. Hung out on IRC. But mostly I seemed to email agents about jobs. The fact that I'm not findind work seems to be effecting my ability ot concentrate on one task.

The market seems to be picking up a bit. JobServe now has two pages of jobs that match my "unix perl contract london" criteria, but they still all have some requirement that I just don't quite meet.

Ah well, it's the weekend. Let's try and put those kinds
of thoughts out of my mind until Monday. Let's switch off
and have a proper weekend slobbing in front of the
DVD player:)

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(to those jobs where you're missing 1 or 2 of the criteria). Half the time, it's the HR/Personnel Dept. writing the ad and just including as many buzzwords as they can to make sure when the interview/hire does happen, the dev. dept. won't fuss 'em out.

As Damian said in his interview w/ pair.com (too lazy to link), the most important thing is knowing HOW to program. Obviously, you're in touch with that... so any aspect that they're looking for you could quickly learn, prolly even before you start work. ;

You're absolutely right about that and I do apply for every job where I match 75% of the requirements.[1]

The problem is that the the recruitment market has changed. Bear in mind that in order for my CV to end up on the desk of the technical manager who wants to employ me, it needs to go thru at least two non-technical people - the recruitment agent and the company HR person. Both of them act as gatekeepers and try to prevent unsuitable CVs from getting thru. Now in the past, they'd have taken a risk on a